


Mabel Pines and the Summer Ending Bummer

by judicatoryPedant



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Ford is there too but I don't feel like he's important enough here to give a full character tag, Gen, Implied/Referenced Torture, Mabel Pines-centric, Same with Xyler and Craz
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-07
Updated: 2021-01-07
Packaged: 2021-03-17 15:40:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28602351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/judicatoryPedant/pseuds/judicatoryPedant
Summary: Mabel stays in her bubble.
Relationships: Dipper Pines & Mabel Pines
Comments: 10
Kudos: 22





	Mabel Pines and the Summer Ending Bummer

**Author's Note:**

> How are you all doing on this fine coup attempt evening?

1.

She watches as Buff Waffles numbers 47 and 68 drag Dipper out of the courtroom. He kicks and screams and she thinks she can see tears starting to fall down his face.

“Mabel!” he shouts. “Mabel, please don’t do this, we need you to help stop—” the courtroom doors close. She feels something wrong in the pit of her stomach, but before she can say or do anything about it—

“Don’t feel bad, Mabel!” Xyler says, playing a riff on his keytar. “You totally made the right choice.”

“You really think so?” she asks. Murmurs, meows, whinnies, and growls of agreement fill the courtroom. She looks for Soos and Wendy, to ask them what they think, but she can’t seem to find them.

“Besides,” Shimmery Twinkleheart says, “Who needs that meanie when you have Dippy Fresh?”

Dippy jumps off the bench of the courthouse and does a flip in the air. So cool. Twinkleheart is DEFINITELY right!

2.

When Mabel steps outside of the courthouse along with all her fun dream friends, the first thing she says is Waddles’ back.

“Waddles?” she asks. The giant(!!! Still cool.) pig looks at her, and he almost looks… upset. He gives a sad oink.

“Waddles, it’ll be okay. Now that Dipper’s gone, summer won’t end and we can have fun forever!” she grins.

The oink Waddles gives at that seems sadder than the first.

3.

She’s been dreaming in claymation again. And she has no idea why.

All of Mabel’s nightmares are built out of clay. When Dipper gets hurt on a mystery hunt, when she sees something she wishes she hadn’t, when anything bad happens during that day, it’s a safe bet she’ll be watching it replay on loop in jerky stop motion during the night.

This… this is different though. Normally, her nightmares were a loop of one single thing or a clip-show of a million different ones, not… one long scene that just wouldn’t end. A giant throne, made of squishy gray scared-looking sculptures of everyone in town. Bill Cipher, huge, real, and cackling. Monsters wreaking havoc as they frame by frame pulled grey humans from a grey throne and used them as little more than toys for their games.

Grunkle Ford, trapped in a squishy pyramid cage, hunched over his nephew, her brother, Dipper, as a dull-looking clay approximation of blood moved off of him. The pale looking clay facsimile of her brother’s skin, marred with blue and black blots, mixed in.

She wakes up, cries, and tries her hardest to forget the dream.

4.

Dippy knocks on her door, and tries to cheer her up after her nightmare. He does cool skateboarding tricks! He tells her jokes that feel just like the ones she would tell Dipper.

He hugs her. He smells… clean. Not just clean, sweet. Sickly sweet, the kind of smell that was supposed to be enticing but instead just reminded you of the toothaches and stomachaches that would come soon after. Nothing like her _real_ brother, who smelled like sweat and outside-for-too-long and the occasional awful dude bodyspray that he sometimes used in an attempt to cover the first two up.

Dippy smells like he showers every day using soap scented like all of Mabel's favorite things. He dresses like he was pulled straight from one of Mabel’s favorite movies. He agrees with everything Mabel says, and he always does whatever Mabel asks him to do.

Dippy is… perfect. He is everything Mabel ever wanted Dipper to be, but that doesn’t make him Dipper, does it?

A voice in the back of her mind whispers to her, _Dipper would have tried to solve the problem instead of just trying to distract you from it._

She feigns a smile as Dippy tells her another joke. This isn’t working— maybe she just needs to go somewhere comforting to think.

5.

The Mabeland Mystery Shack, Mabel thinks, is one of her proudest creations. Filled to the brim with authentic monsters, advertised by a fun mascot, a fun spot for the residents of Mabeland to hang out, and a place where everyone is free to work how they feel like working. Dippy Fresh goes off to give a tour with Marble Grunkle Stan once they arrive.

Mabel walks up the stairs and heads into the attic. It looks exactly how it looked when she left the Shack outside Mabeland, down to the trees outside the window despite the window actually leading to the rest of Mabeland. She looks at Dipper’s side of the room and feels— something, she doesn’t know what, but she does know this: she doesn’t like it. She waves away Dipper's side of the room and feels… worse, somehow. She brings it back.

She plops down on her bed and stares across the room, at Dipper’s stuff, his chewed-up pens and his big dumb conspiracy board and his brown hat. She looks on and cries. There’s no crying in Mabeland, but this place doesn’t feel like part of Mabeland— it just feels like home.

She tearily pulls out a scrapbook and is pulled into a memory, one they had shown during the trial: her 2nd-grade school picture day. She smiles as her younger self shakes her head over and over again and the beads in her hair click together and winces as Stephanie sticks gum into her hair. She almost walks out of the memory, but then—

Dipper shaves his head alongside young-Mabel, and old-Mabel cries again. She wipes her face with her sweater only to need to do it again, over and over and over. She misses Dipper, the _real_ Dipper, that’s the feeling, and she’s only realized it AFTER it was too late to do anything about it. She’s so dumb and stupid and horrible and awful and she’s stuck without her brother forever because of that.

She pushes herself out of the memory and back into the attic. She startles as she arrives back and sees—

6.

“Wendy? Soos? What are you guys doing here?” Wendy starts dragging Mabel by the arm, out of the attic.

“We need to leave. Now.” Wendy says seriously. She’s covered in scrapes and there are bags under her eyes and her knuckles are bruised. Mabel scrambled to keep up as they headed down the stairs.

“What’s going on?” Soos looks worse off— he has a black eye and his arm has a deep gash on it, covered with a torn piece of fabric. Mabel snaps her fingers and the injuries disappear, but Soos is still cradling his arm and Wendy is still running.

“We saw these two like— muscley waffle dudes taking Dipper somewhere. I tried to stop them but then Tambry and Lee held me back— but I guess they weren’t Tambry and Lee, because they turned into gross, like, bug things once I fought them off,” Wendy said. “I tried to find Soos, but I only got to him once everything else started turning into these weird... bug things.”

Mabel looked out the window. Rolling fields of brightly colored yarn turned red and began… squirming. She grimaced, then shuddered, looking down. “I… I think I made a mistake.”

An explosion sounded off in the distance.

“We should probably leave now,” Soos said, grabbing her and Wendy by the wrists and pulling them off towards the horizon.

7.

They emerge from the rapidly transforming bubble into a world that’s even worse.

Mabel stares out at the radically altered landscape. The roaming water tower, the eyed trees, the red sky with a giant tear and pyramid in the center. “I did this,” she whispered, tears brimming in her eyes.

“What—no—hey,” Soos puts his hand on Mabel’s shoulder and kneels, taking Mabel down with him. He looks Mabel in the eyes. “Look, dude, whatever you did, this wasn’t your fault. Bill’s been planning this for like, literal millennia. He would have gotten through eventually.”

Mabel gets back up and starts pacing. She shakes her hand as begins to speak. “I thought I was dreaming! I thought you guys were in my head, like with Stan, and I kicked out Dipper— oh my god, _Dipper_ ,” Mabel almost starts to wail, but Wendy clamps her hand over her mouth.

Mabel moves to lick it on reflex, but Wendy hisses “Mabel, Dipper’s probably at the shack. But if you give us away and get us caught, we will never get to find out either way. Capiche?”

Mabel nods, and Wendy lifts her hand off of her mouth. Mabel lets out a breath. Yeah, Dipper’s probably at the Shack, with Stan and Ford! All they need to do is get there and she can apologize and she and Dipper can team up to take down Bill.

8.

He’s not at the shack. Tears well up in Mabel’s eyes, and she flings herself into Grunkle Stan’s arms. He pulls her closer and rocks back and forth, back and forth has she snots up his shoulder.

He sets her down and kneels down in order to look in her eyes when he says, “We’re gonna get your brother back.”

9.

They break into the castle, the (expertly named, if you asked Mabel Shack-A-Tron taking on Bill’s cronies outside.

The throne falls, and awake come Dipper and Ford, real and here and _alive_. They hug for a moment, a family, and she says “I’m so sorry” and Dipper says “It’s okay,” and she thinks in that moment maybe things will be. Not perfect, not sugar candy rotten toothache sweet, but okay.

**Author's Note:**

> I originally wanted to get this out like... August of last year but it kind of fell off, and I only revisited it to get away from the news today, so that's why the ending feels a little rushed. 
> 
> I'm a fan of like.... hollow angst. Angst that stems from that quiet feeling of things Not Being Right and grieving and stuff. Angst that you try and patch over with something else only to reveal how empty and broken you are without someone. 
> 
> ALSO ALSO: this is made in a verse with pines parents wirt and sara so mabel's hairstyle on picture day is [something](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d6/fe/0d/d6fe0d8e50af7b3b64083b2f585aa941.jpg) [along](https://hairstylecamp.com/wp-content/uploads/Little-Girl-Hairstyles-with-Beads7.jpg) [these](https://diydecorcrafts.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/25_LITTLE_BLACK_GIRL_HAIRSTYLES_-1-12.jpg) [lines.](https://images.saymedia-content.com/.image/ar_3:2%2Cc_limit%2Ccs_srgb%2Cfl_progressive%2Cq_auto:good%2Cw_700/MTc0NTAwOTc5NzY4MjQwMTE4/natural-braided-african-american-ethnic-child-hairstyles-for-little-and-big-girls-using-beads.jpg) They take forever and were SO PAINFUL but the ability to shake your head and hear the clacking sound was worth it for me as a kid and so I can imagine it would be worth it to a kid like mabel.
> 
> There were originally 10 bits and not 9 but then I realized I had no clue how to write a fight scene, much less a fight scene between a robot and a giant monster from the perspective of someone inside the robot, so I just cut it out, especially because it wouldn't diverge _that_ dramatically from the show.
> 
> Idk if you ask questions in the comments I'll probably answer them but I cannot think of anything else to put in this author's note so. Bye? I guess? Either for like. Another few years or as soon as possible. Probably no in-between there.


End file.
